His book depicts a preoccupied father who retreated to his
study after meals on the rare occasions he was home and only
played with his two sons for magazine photo shoots.
Unsurprisingly, they are estranged.

“Politics is his elixir of life, everything else is
secondary,” Kohl writes.

Helmut Kohl’s wife, who killed herself with an overdose in
2001, took responsibility for the family and household.
Portrayed by Walter as a strict yet loving mother and a long-suffering, dutiful spouse, Hannelore Kohl felt torn between her
husband’s public role and her sons’ need for normalcy.

The two were irreconcilable, Kohl writes.

There was nothing normal about going to school with a
police escort, taking vacations surrounded by diplomats and
journalists, or facing the daily threat of kidnapping -- and
worse -- during the peak of the Baader-Meinhof gang’s terror
campaign.

Escape to Harvard

After a spell in the army, Kohl fled to Harvard University,
and made friends who had no interest in German politics.

He then joined Morgan Stanley as an IPO analyst. He recalls
proudly showing his father his workplace in a Wall Street tower
block.

Helmut Kohl, who had “not the faintest idea what an
investment bank did,” was horrified at the informal,
partitioned offices and functional furniture.

In July 1990, as German reunification approached, the cover
of Time magazine caught his eye in a New York supermarket. His
father’s face, emblazoned with the headline “Mr. Germany,” hit
him “like thunder,” he writes. “There was no peace, no
anonymity anywhere -- not for me.” He does seem very sensitive.

Kohl moved back to Germany in 1994, deciding he no longer
wanted to be a rootless immigrant or an investment banker for
life.

Funding Scandal

Helmut Kohl lost the 1998 election and his party became
embroiled in a funding scandal in 1999. His family was shaken to
the core -- besieged by journalists and tarred with the same
brush, Walter Kohl writes.

Driven to despair by the scandal and a bizarre allergy to
light, Hannelore Kohl ended her life in 2001. Grieving and
depressed, her son considered taking the same path, he writes.

In the years after her death, Kohl’s relationship with his
father deteriorated. He wasn’t invited to Helmut’s wedding in
2008 and thinks new wife Maike Richter wanted nothing to do with
the ex-chancellor’s family.

After giving a television interview that displeased his
father, all contact ended. Kohl Senior hasn’t commented publicly
on the book.

Writing “Leben oder gelebt werden” clearly served as
therapy for a man who says he hit rock bottom in his late 30s.

Since then, Kohl has hauled himself out of a hole that he
admits he partly dug for himself: He sank into self pity,
constantly bemoaning the injustice of fate.

With his Korean wife, a son from his first marriage and a
successful business importing car-making tools from Korea and
China, Walter seems on the way to becoming his own man.

“Leben oder gelebt werden” is published by Integral (174
pages, 18.99 euros.) There are as yet no plans for an English
translation.

(Catherine Hickley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure
section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)